Latest

Re-enchanting the Human in the Age of AI: 5 Irreplaceable Human Beings

ByRichelle SteynJul 25, 20254 mins

What AI can simulate, these humans embody: fragility, risk, truth, and sacred meaning.

Designing a Regenerative Cultural Economy

ByRichelle SteynJun 23, 202516 mins

“When values-aligned actors begin to acquire digital works from the Art Stoke Commons ecosystem, they don’t just support individual artists – they validate a new logic of cultural production. Each successful Hive becomes a proof-of-concept. Each replication, a new node in a growing network of islands of coherence. If it works in South Africa where the wounds of inequality and…

Why South African Digital Art Needs Its Own Space

ByRichelle SteynJun 9, 20254 mins

“In a country where the need to rewrite the past is still urgent, digital art should not be reduced to tokenized pixels. It should be part of a national cultural ecosystem that allows truth, disruption, and ordinary complexity to emerge.”

Scheer Post Mr Fish
Boycott Divest Sanction Israel

More Articles

Imagining Otherwise Under Conditions of Impunity

ByRichelle SteynJan 2, 20266 mins
“Capitalism does not merely constrain change; it organises which forms of suffering matter, which legal rulings are enforced, and which crimes are indefinitely deferred. It functions as a selective enforcement regime, shielding actors embedded in military, financial, and diplomatic infrastructures from consequence.”

The Quiet Extractive Machine: How Soft-Power Art Non-Profits are Rewriting Africa’s Future in VR

ByRichelle SteynNov 21, 20256 mins
There is a new kind of extractive industry rising quietly across the African cultural landscape—nothing as obvious as mining, nothing as brutal as the colonial museum raid. Instead, it arrives with friendly logos, “innovation labs,” creative grants, workshops for emerging storytellers, and the promise of global visibility.

The Obsession with Profit & the Dark Side of Technological Innovation

ByRichelle SteynSep 30, 20248 mins
The tech world is obsessed with profit and that obsession is showing symptoms of an unsettling pattern, the exploitation of human vulnerability disguised as technological innovation and progress. This article presents three compelling examples: the militarization of AI, the creeping influence of centralised finance on decentralised finance, and the rise of unemployment-tech. Together they illustrate […]
Art Stoke Commons Public Goods for collective impact and systems change using decentralised frameworks
Israeli Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza 2